tides

A photo of a Michigan man looks startlingly surreal, as if he’s walking on water, but in reality he’s standing on an ice-covered lake near Boyne City in the northern part of the state.

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It wasn’t a hoax, as some have suggested, according to Andre Poineau, who said he ventured out onto Lake Charlevoix in mid-January when the ice was more than 2 inches thick and so clear, you could see the sandy ripples on the lake bottom.

No, this is not a Photoshop manipulation. And it's not Biblical water-walking skills. It's a photograph of Andre...Posted by Detroit Free Press on Monday, January 23, 2017

Such extremely clear ice occurs under certain conditions.

“I’ve seen it several times before. The water in Lake Charlevoix is incredibly clear to begin with, partly because of zebra mussels,” Poineau told MLive.com.

“When it freezes without agitation, there are hardly any oxygen bubbles in the ice. “

“It happens on rare occasions,” he added.

Poineau, 63, says he was a little apprehensive about stepping out on the ice that day and had a shovel with him to test its strength. It passed the test.

Photographer Martha Sulfridge took the stunning shot on Jan. 15 and the rest, as they say, is history. The picture has gone viral and has been shared on Facebook more than 60,000 times.

About 5.25 trillion — that's a conservative estimate of just how many pieces of plastic are swirling around the world's oceans, from microscopic fragments, to giant islands of trash. And they're not going away anytime soon. (Video via National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

That's 700 times the number of humans estimated to live on the planet, and there's no part of the ocean that's completely unaffected.

Want more big numbers? All that plastic trash is estimated to weigh just under 270,000 tons -- about as much as either 38,000 full-grown elephants, 157,000 Volkswagen beetles or just under 7 billion coffee lids.

Those numbers come from a paper the 5 Gyres Institute released Wednesday after six years of surveying some 1,500 locations across all the world's oceans.

The institute gathered samples with mesh nets and conducted a visual survey under the leadership of the institute's research director Marcus Eriksen. (Video via 5 Gyres)

Eriksen told The Washington Post, "What we are witnessing in the global ocean is a growing threat of toxin-laden microplastics cycling through the entire marine ecosystem."

Microplastics are tiny fragments of plastic less than 5 mm in length that can easily be swept along ocean currents and often carry toxins or foreign microbes and other organisms to nonnative environments. (Video via Stichting De Noordzee)

Because they're so small and the plastic is so durable, microplastics present a long-term threat to ocean ecosystems across the globe.

While those microplastics can be virtually invisible in the water, the largest concentrations of trash often get swept up in the five major gyres — ocean currents that move in circular patterns in each of the world's oceans. (Video via One World One Ocean)

Those gyres can sometimes produce large islands of trash, although phenomena like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are usually just patches of ocean with higher concentrations of debris and not physical landmasses. (Video via Grassroots News)

The study's authors say the estimates on the number and weight of plastics in the ocean are highly conservative and are actually probably the minimum.